On this date in 1848, a carpenter named James Wilson Marshall discovered gold nuggets in the tailrace of a mill he was building on a tributary of the American River known as Sutter's Creek.
The discovery would personally enrich neither Marshall nor John Sutter, his partner in the project. Counterintuitively, it ruined their fortunes. Nonetheless, finding gold transformed the settlement of the American West, expedited California's admittance to the Union, and ignited a feverish optimism in the soon-to-be-dubbed "Golden State" that has never really gone away.
It seems that gold was found at Sutter's Creek on Jan. 24, 1848, quite by accident. The men there were not even mining; they were constructing a sawmill. Yet, the New Jersey-born James Marshall had spent enough time in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to know the soil, rocks, and streams of that region, and he had an inkling something was about to happen.
The day before, Marshall had confided in one of the young men from the famed "Mormon Battalion" who had marched from Utah to California and had been hired to help build the mill. His name was James Stephens Brown, and he was a North Carolina native and recent convert to the LDS faith who would live to see the 20th century. But on this day, he was still six months shy of his 20th birthday, and although he'd seen a lot of country, he'd not seen much gold. That was about to change.
"Mr. Marshall called me to come to him," Brown wrote in his memoir. "I went, and found him examining the bed rock. He said, ‘This is a curious rock, I am afraid that it will give us trouble,' and as he probed it a little further, he said, ‘I believe that it contains minerals of some kind, and I believe that there is gold in these hills.'"
Yes, James Marshall actually said those words: gold in these hills. At the time, it wasn't a laugh line, although the men with Marshall did display skeptical irreverence. The following morning, Brown and the other men were joking that Marshall -- who was awake earlier than usual -- had gone to find his gold mine. And that's exactly what he had done.
Carrying his old wool hat in his hand, Marshall approached the men and showed them what it contained: a dozen or so gold nuggets. "Boys," he exclaimed, "I have got her now!"
And so he did. The men were sworn to secrecy, but it was not a secret that kept. Marshall and his men weren't even successful in keeping their claims over their own creek bed. Sam Brannan, a Mormon businessman who visited the mill, started the stampede by literally running through the streets of San Francisco shouting, "Gold from the American River!"
But as 1848 dragged on, these reports were commonly dismissed "back East" as the workings of over-active imaginations on the part of Western civic boosters. All that changed in December when President James A. Polk noted in his State of the Union address that "explorations already made warrant the belief that the supply is very large and that gold is found at various places in an extensive district of country." Within weeks, the Gold Rush was on in earnest.
Very few of those who rushed from all over the country and the world to California's gold fields ever struck it rich. So the question arises: Was it worth it -- was the Gold Rush, in the end, a good thing? The answer is: At the time, not for everyone. It certainly didn't seem so if you were a member of the local Miwok or Maidu people, for whom the mass influx of white settlers meant the violent appropriation their ancestral lands.
When I grew up in California, the story of discovering gold at Sutter Mill was taught to every schoolchild. The fate of the Miwok and Maidu and dozens of other Native American tribes? Not so much. Today, we are engaged in a great cultural civil war about the telling of our national story. Has the pendulum swung too far? In my view, yes. In the 10 years since I wrote in this space about the discovery of gold, for instance, San Francisco's school board has been taken over by half-educated zealots who want to teach kids that the 49ers were all "colonizers." In Sacramento, the statue of John Sutter was removed. Others have been destroyed, including one of Father Junipero Serra, a Catholic saint.
And yet even though woke progressives come across as both ignorant and arrogant, their impulse to challenge the traditional national narrative is not wrong. It is healthy. Nor is it subversive to question an economic system that rewarded John Marshall not at all for his discovery and forced Sutter to sell all his holdings.
Another lesson with a 21st century application is the power of politics: Gold was discovered in 1848, but the Gold Rush didn't start until nearly a year later. Why? Because a U.S. president spread the word. Sometimes it takes presidents a while, but they possess very big megaphones, which can be used for good causes or bad -- or those in the middle.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
